“Mission Mausam” Approved by Union Cabinet to Predict, Respond to Extreme Weather Events

New Delhi: “Mission Mausam” received the nod from the Union Cabinet on Wednesday to enhance India’s ability to predict and respond to extreme weather events as well as the impacts of climate change.

In the first phase, the Union Cabinet has allocated Rs 2,000 crore for “Mission Mausam”.

Union Ministry of Earth Sciences Secretary M. Ravichandran said the five-year mission would be implemented in two phases. The first phase, which runs until March 2026, will focus on expanding the observation network. This includes adding around 70 Doppler radars, high-performance computers and setting up 10 wind profilers and 10 radiometers.

The second phase will focus on adding satellites and aircraft to further enhance observational capabilities.

According to the Ministry of Earth Sciences, this project will meet the challenges related to tropical weather forecasting as well as climate changes that are making the atmosphere more chaotic, resulting in isolated heavy rainfall and localised droughts. It will also delve into cloudbursts, thunderstorms, lightning and squalls that are the least understood weather events in India.

Over the five-year period, the ministry and its institutions — the India Meteorological Department, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and the National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting — will work to improve their understanding of weather and climate processes and prediction capabilities and develop weather management technologies.

Mission Mausam aims to improve short to medium range weather forecast accuracy by five to 10 per cent and enhance air quality prediction in all major metro cities by up to 10 per cent.

It will enable weather prediction up to the panchayat level with a lead time of 10 to 15 days and improve the nowcast frequency from three hours to one hour.

A “cloud chamber” will be established at the Indian Institute of Meteorology in Pune within the next one and a half years under the mission to study the processes occurring within clouds in the context of rising temperatures.